The present invention relates to a manually-operated cutting device for removing the upper part of plastic or metal alloy capsules or caps, generally provided to protect the cork for closing bottles of wine and the like, before removing the cork by using conventional corkscrews.
It is well-known that in vineyards the upper part of the neck of bottles of wine, usually rather fine wine, is usually covered with capsules or caps made of plastics or metal alloy after the cork has been inserted in the neck. These capsules in practice protect the cork from atmospheric agents as well as the wine from alterations caused by the porosity of the corks, which may not ensure perfect tightness to the passage of air which, as known, would cause undesirable alterations in the organoleptic properties of the wine.
It is also well-known that removal of the protective capsules from the neck of the bottles before removing the cork often entails difficulties in execution: in some cases, as for example in a home environment, the capsule is in fact not removed but torn in an irregular fashion by the screw-shaped stem of the corkscrew as it is inserted fully into the cork.
This operation entails the drawback of making cork extraction more difficult and of forming, after extraction, frayed or untidily cut capsule parts that must be removed manually and with difficulty in order to correctly pour the wine or liquor.
In other cases, in order to remove at least the flat part of the capsule covering the cork, various cutting devices are used in addition to normal knives, which are difficult to use, and allow to correctly cut the upper part of the capsule without excessive efforts and quickly.
Thus, for example, rigid twin-blade cutters are known that can be opened out in a scissorlike fashion but entail, at the beginning and during cutting, difficulties in positioning and guiding the blades on the bottle neck, considerable efforts to keep the two blades closed, and a rotary motion of the blades around the neck that always covers more than 180.degree. and sometimes more than 360.degree..
Other cutting devices are also known which are constituted by a rectangular metallic lamina folded in a U-like shape and supporting, at the ends of its two wings, two sharp laminae or wheels that face each other on the same plane and allow to cut the upper part of the capsule by clamping the two wings and turning them through more than 180.degree. around the bottle neck; in other cases, the U-shaped lamina supports, at its ends, two curved blades with a sharp cutting edge that are opposite and co-planar with respect to each other and allow to cut the capsule with a 180.degree. rotation.
In practice, these known capsule cutting devices require the use of U-shaped steel blades the dimensions whereof are chosen so as to be thin and have longitudinal sharp edges; accordingly, in addition to being scarcely elegant, they are also scarcely practical due to the difficulty in keeping two thin wings stable between the fingers of one's hand during rotation for cutting,
Said cutting devices, which are entirely made of metal, furthermore require rather high production costs.